x, 218 pages : 23 cm

"Göran Grimvall is determined to help mere mortals understand how scientists get to the kernel of perplexing problems. Entertaining and enlightening, his latest book uses examples from sports, literature, and nature -- as well as from the varied worlds of science -- to illustrate how scientists make sense of and explain the world around us. Grimvall's fun-to-read essays and easy-to-follow examples detail how order-of-magnitude estimation, extreme cases, dimensional analysis, and other modeling methods work. They also reveal how nonscientists absorb these concepts and use them at home, school, and work."--Publisher summary

Includes bibliographical references and index

Numbers : Numerical literacy: Babylon, babble, and billion, Prefixes, What is the point? ; The power of logarithms: Order of magnitude, Hot air balloons and Renard numbers, Finding fraud in figures ; What is typical?: The height of an adult, Social competence and personal encounters, Hit by returning rocket ; Estimates : Is anybody out there?, Sand, sibyl, Olympic medals, and homeopathy, Cover the Earth with paper -- Measures : What is it on a scale?: The Richter scale, Nuclear incidents and accidents, Natural threats ; Comparing apples and oranges: Human well-being and poverty, Track and field, At scout camp ; Units: Going metric : inch by inch, Horsepower and manpower, The loss of a spacecraft ; On the road: Left-hand traffic, The value of a life, Gasoline here and there -- Accuracy and significance : Could you be more precise, please?: What is Austria's population?, A slim waist, Man on the moon ; Significant?: Flunking, A change in opinion, Error bars ; Limit values: Will your iPod make you deaf?, Lethal dose, The weakest link ; Fair games?: Winning by a small margin, Accurate timing, Are all sports venues equivalent? -- Extrapolations : The dangerous exponential: The rule of 72, A problematic reward, Suddenly nothing was left ; The ubiquitous straight line: Dubious extrapolations, Moore's Law, Low radiation level and cancer ; Scaling: Big and small fish, Gulliver, Roasting a turkey ; Looking ahead: The law of diminishing returns, The sign of the second derivative, Lynx and hare -- Models : What are the chances?: Proofreading, Losing a leg, Sunday traffic ; Seeking the optimum: Tax rates and the autobahn, Running to the rescue, Selecting the best golf club ; Focus on the essential: How small can a mouse be?, The age of the Earth, A loud party ; A law or a model?: Ohm's Law is not a law, A mad pursuit, Is Coulomb's Law exact? -- The real world : Plausible, but not correct: The unridable bicycle, Church windows and lead roofs, The bathtub vortex ; You see what you want to see: Waves are rolling in, Galileo Galilei's trial, Submarines and mink ; Suddenly something happens: Fishing nets, coffee percolators, and the web, Goethe and the height of trees, Supercooled rain and critical mass ; Engineering versus science : Slapstick, Not a schoolbook problem, Hoisting a sack -- Tricks of the trade : A crash course in science thinking: Dinghy, anchor, and pool, Up and down the escalator, The floating apple ; Is the formula accurate enough?: Obesity, Wind chill temperature, The size of a ship ; Characteristic quantities: How deep is deep?, The coldest day of the year, Galileo Galilei, basketball, and table tennis ; Impress them!: What is your BMI?, The Aeolian harp, One trick and two areas -- Epilogue: Seven principles in scientific literacy

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